The Darkest Room

2

The ship inside the bottle was a little work of art, in Henrik’s opinion: a three-masted frigate with sails made out of scraps of white fabric, almost six inches long and carved from a single piece of wood. Each sail had ropes made of black thread, knotted and secured to small blocks of balsa wood. With the masts down, the ship had been carefully inserted into the old bottle using steel thread and tweezers, then pressed down into a sea of blue-colored putty. Then the masts had been raised and the sails unfurled with the help of bent sock needles. Finally the bottle had been fastened with a sealed cork.

The ship in the bottle must have taken several weeks to make, but the Serelius brothers destroyed it in a couple of seconds.

Tommy Serelius swept the bottle off the bookshelf, the glass exploding into tiny shards on the new parquet flooring of the cottage. The ship itself survived the fall, but bounced

across the floor for a couple of yards before it was stopped by little brother Freddy’s boot. He shone his flashlight on it with curiosity for a few seconds, then lifted his foot and smashed the ship to pieces with three hard stamps.

“Teamwork!” crowed Freddy.

“I hate things like that, fucking handicraft stuff,” said Tommy, scratching his cheek and kicking the remains of the ship across the floor.

Henrik, the third man in the cottage, emerged from one of the bedrooms where he had been searching for anything of value in the closets. He saw what was left of the ship and shook his head.

“Don’t smash anything else up, okay?” he said quietly.

Tommy and Freddy liked the sound of breaking glass, of splintering wood-Henrik had realized that the first night they worked together, when they broke into half a dozen closed-up cottages south of Byxelkrok. The brothers liked smashing things; on the way north Tommy had run over a black-and-white cat that was standing by the side of the road, its eyes glittering. There was a dull thud from the right-hand tire as the van drove over the cat, and the next second the brothers were laughing out loud.

Henrik never broke anything; he removed the windows carefully so they could get into the cottages. But once the brothers had clambered in, they turned into vandals. They upended cocktail cabinets and hurled glass and china to the floor. They also smashed mirrors, but hand-blown vases from Småland survived, because they could be sold.

At least they weren’t targeting the residents of the island. From the start Henrik had decided to select only houses owned by those who lived on the mainland.

Henrik wasn’t keen on the Serelius brothers, but he was stuck with them-like a couple of relatives who come to call one evening and then refuse to leave.

But Tommy and Freddy weren’t from the island, and were neither his friends nor his relatives. They were friends of Morgan Berglund.

They had rung the doorbell of Henrik’s little apartment in Borgholm at the end of September, at around ten o’clock when he was just thinking of going to bed. He had opened the door to find two men of about his own age standing outside, broad-shouldered and with more or less shaven heads. They had nodded and walked into the hallway without asking permission. They stank of sweat and oil and dirty car seats, and the stench spread through the apartment.

“Hubba bubba, Henke,” said one of them.

He was wearing big sunglasses. It should have looked comical, but this was not a person to be laughed at. He had long red marks on his cheeks and chin, as if someone had scratched him.

“How’s it goin’?”

“Okay, I guess,” said Henrik slowly. “Who are you?”

“Tommy and Freddy. The Serelius brothers. Hell, you must have heard of us, Henrik… You must know who we are?”

Tommy adjusted his glasses and scratched his cheek with long, raking strokes. Henrik realized where the marks on his face had come from-he hadn’t been in a fight, he had caused them himself.

Then the brothers had taken a quick tour of his one-bedroom apartment and slumped down on the sofa in front of the TV.

“Got any chips?” said Freddy.

He rested his boots on Henrik’s glass table. When he unbuttoned his padded jacket, his beer belly protruded in a pale blue T-shirt with the slogan SOLDIER OF FORTUNE FOREVER.

“Your pal Mogge says hi,” said big brother Tommy, removing the sunglasses. He was slightly slimmer than Freddy and was staring at Henrik with a little smile playing at the corners of his mouth and a black leather bag in his hand. “It was Mogge who thought we should come here.”

“To Siberia,” said Freddy, pulling the bowl of chips Henrik had provided toward him.

“Mogge? Morgan Berglund?”

“Sure thing,” said Tommy, sitting down on the sofa next to his brother. “You’re pals, right?”

“We were,” said Henrik. “Mogge’s moved away.”

“We know, he’s in Denmark. He was working in a casino in Copenhagen, illegally.”

“Dirty dealing,” said Freddy.

“We’ve been in Europe,” said Tommy. “For almost a year. Makes you realize how fucking small Sweden is.”

“Fucking backwater,” said Freddy.

“First of all we were in Germany-Hamburg and Düsseldorf, that was fucking brilliant. Then we went to Copenhagen, and that was pretty cool too.” Tommy looked around again. “And now we’re here.”

He nodded and put a cigarette in the corner of his mouth.

“Don’t smoke in here,” said Henrik.

He had been wondering why the Serelius brothers had left the big cities of Europe-if things had indeed been going so bloody well down there-and traveled up to the isolation of small-town Sweden. Had they quarreled with the wrong people? Probably.

“You can’t stay here,” said Henrik, looking around his one-bedroom apartment. “I haven’t got room. You can see that.”

Tommy had put the cigarette away. He didn’t appear to be listening.

“We’re Satanists,” he said. “Did we mention that?”

“Satanists?” said Henrik.

Tommy and Freddy nodded.

“You mean devil worshippers?” said Henrik with a smile.

Tommy wasn’t smiling.

“We don’t worship anyone,” he said. “Satan stands for the strength within human beings, that’s what we believe in.”

“The force,” said Freddy, finishing off the chips.

“Exactly,” said Tommy. “‘Might makes right’-that’s our motto. We take what we want. Have you heard of Aleister Crowley?”

“No.”

“A great philosopher,” said Tommy. “Crowley saw life as a constant battle between the strong and the weak. Between the clever and the stupid. Where the strongest and cleverest always win.”

“Well, that’s logical,” said Henrik, who had never been religious. He had no intention of becoming religious now, either.

Tommy carried on looking around the apartment.

“When did she cut and run?” he asked.

“Who?”

“Your girl. The one who put up curtains and dried flowers and all that crap. You didn’t do it, did you?”

“She moved out last spring,” said Henrik.

A memory of Camilla sprang unbidden into his mind, lying reading on the sofa where the Serelius brothers were now sitting. He realized that Tommy was a bit smarter than he looked-he noticed details.

“What was her name?”

“Camilla.”

“Do you miss her?”

“Like dog shit,” he said quickly. “Anyway, like I said, you can’t stay…”

“Chill out, we’re staying in Kalmar,” said Tommy. “That’s all sorted, but we’re thinking of working here on Öland. So we need a bit of help.”

“With what?”

“Mogge told us what you and he used to do in the winter. He told us about the summer cottages…”

“I see.”

“He said you’d be happy to start up again.”

Thanks for that, Mogge, thought Henrik. They had quarreled about the division of the money before Morgan left-perhaps this was his revenge.

“That was a long time ago,” he said. “Four years… and we only did it for two winters, really.”

“And? Mogge said it went well.”

“It went okay,” said Henrik.

Virtually all the break-ins had been problem free, but a couple of times he and Mogge had been spotted by the people next door and had to make their escape over stone walls, like kids stealing apples. They had always worked out at least two escape routes in advance, one on foot and one in the car.

He went on: “Sometimes there wasn’t anything of value… but once we found a cupboard, it was really old. A seventeenth-century German cabinet, we got thirty-five thousand kronor for that in Kalmar.”

Henrik had become more animated as he was talking, almost nostalgic. He had actually had quite a talent for getting in through locked veranda doors and windows without smashing them. His grandfather had been a carpenter in Marnäs and had been equally proud of his expertise.

But he also remembered how stressful it had been, driving around northern Öland night after night. It was bitterly cold up there in the winter, both in the wind outdoors and inside the closed-up houses. And the holiday villages were empty and silent.

“Old houses are real treasure troves,” said Tommy. “So you’re in? We need you to find our way around up there.”

Henrik didn’t say anything. He was thinking that a person who has a miserable, predictable life must be miserable and predictable themselves. He didn’t want to be like that.

“So we’re agreed, then,” said Tommy. “Okay?”

“Maybe,” said Henrik.

“That sounds like a yes.”

“Maybe.”

“Hubba bubba,” said Tommy.

Henrik nodded, hesitantly.

He wanted to be exciting, to have an exciting life. Now that Camilla had moved out, the evenings were miserable and the nights were empty, but still he hesitated. It wasn’t the risk of being caught that had made Henrik give up the break-ins before, it was a different kind of fear.

“It’s dark out in the country,” he said.

“Sounds good,” said Tommy.

“It’s bloody dark,” said Henrik. “There are no streetlights in the villages, and the power in the cottages is usually switched off. You can hardly see a thing.”

“No problem,” said Tommy. “We pocketed some flashlights at a gas station yesterday.”

Henrik nodded slowly. Flashlights got rid of the darkness, of course, but only to a certain extent.

“I’ve got a boathouse we can use,” he said. “For storage, until we find the right buyer.”

“Great,” said Tommy. “Then all we have to do is find the right houses. Mogge said you know some good places.”

“Some,” said Henrik. “It goes with the job.”

“Give us the addresses, then we can check if they’re safe.”

“What are you talking about?”

“We’ll ask Aleister.”

“What?”

“We usually chat with Aleister Crowley,” said Tommy, placing his bag on the table. He opened it and took out a narrow, flat box, made of dark wood. “We contact him using this.”

Henrik looked on in silence as Tommy unfolded the box and placed it on the table. Letters, words, and numbers were seared into the wood on the inside of the box. The entire alphabet was there, plus numbers from zero to ten and the words YES and NO. Then Tommy took a small glass out of his bag.

“I tried this out when I was a kid,” said Henrik. “The spirit in the glass, isn’t it?”

“Like fuck it is, this is serious.” Tommy placed the glass on the unfolded box. “This is a Ouija board.”

“A Ouija board?”

“That’s what it’s called,” said Tommy. “The wood is from the lid of an old coffin. Can you turn the lights down a little?”

Henrik smiled to himself, but went over to the light switch anyway.

All three sat around the table. Tommy placed his little finger on the glass and closed his eyes.

The room fell silent. He scratched his throat slowly and seemed to be listening for something.

“Who’s there?” he asked. “Is Aleister there?”

Nothing happened for a few seconds. Then the glass began to move beneath Tommy’s finger.

Henrik had gone out to his grandfather’s boathouse the very next evening, at twilight, to get it ready.

The little wooden hut was painted red and stood in a meadow a dozen or so yards from the shore, close to two other small cottages owned by summer visitors; no one came near them after the middle of August. You could be left in peace here.

He had inherited the boathouse from his grandfather, Algot. When he was alive, they would both go out to sea several times every summer to put out nets, then spend the night in the boathouse and get up at five to check them.

Out here on the Baltic shore he missed those days, and thought it was sad that his grandfather was no longer around. Algot had carried on with his carpentry and little bits of building after his retirement, and had seemed perfectly content with his life right up until the last heart attack, despite the fact that he had left the island only a few times.

Henrik undid the padlock and peered into the darkness

inside. Everything looked more or less as it had done when his grandfather passed away six years earlier. Nets hung along the walls, the workbench was still standing on the floor, and the iron stove was rusting away in one corner. Camilla had wanted to clear everything out and paint the inside walls white, but Henrik thought it was just fine the way it was.

He cleared away oilcans, toolboxes, and other things that were on the wooden floor and spread out a tarpaulin ready for the stolen goods. Then he went out onto the jetty on the point and breathed in the smell of seaweed and brackish salt water. To the north he could see the twin lighthouses at Eel Point rising up out at sea.

Down below the jetty was his motorboat, an open launch, and when he looked down into it he could see that the floor was covered in rainwater. He climbed down into the boat and began baling out.

As he was working he thought back over what had happened the previous evening, when he and the Serelius brothers had sat down in the kitchen and held a séance. Or whatever it might have been.

The glass had moved constantly across the board, providing answers to every question-but of course it was Tommy himself who had been moving it. He had closed his eyes, but he must have been peeping to make sure the glass ended up in the right place.

At any rate, it had turned out that the spirit of Aleister wholeheartedly supported their plans to break into summer cottages. When Tommy asked about the village of Stenvik, which Henrik had suggested, the glass had moved to YES, and when he asked if there were valuable things in the cottages up there, he had been given the same answer: YES.

Finally Tommy had asked, “Aleister, what do you think… can the three of us trust one another?”

The little glass had remained still for a few seconds. Then it had slowly moved to NO.

Tommy gave a brief, hoarse laugh.

“That’s okay,” he said, looking at Henrik. “I don’t trust anybody.”

Four days later Henrik and the Serelius brothers had made their first trip north, to the cluster of summer cottages that Henrik had selected and Aleister had approved. There were only closed-up houses there, pitch black in the darkness.

Henrik and the brothers weren’t looking for small, expensive objects when they broke open a window and got into a cottage-they knew no summer visitors were stupid enough to leave cash, designer watches, or gold necklaces behind in their cottages over the winter. But certain things were too difficult to transport home from the country when the holiday was over: televisions, music systems, bottles of spirits, boxes of cigarettes, and golf clubs. And in the outbuildings there could be chain saws, cans of gas, and electric drills.

After Tommy and Freddy had smashed the ship in the bottle and Henrik had finished muttering about it, they split up and carried on searching for treasures.

Henrik carried on into the smaller rooms. The front of the house faced the rocky coastline and the sound, and through a picture window he could see the chalk-white half-moon suspended above the water. Stenvik was one of the small empty fishing villages on the west coast of the island.

Every room he went into met him with silence, but Henrik still had the feeling that the walls and the floor were watching him. For that reason he moved carefully, without making any mess.

“Hello? Henke?”

It was Tommy, and Henrik called back: “Where are you?”

“Here, just off the kitchen… it’s some kind of office.”

Henrik followed Tommy’s voice through the narrow

kitchen. He was standing by the wall in a windowless room, pointing with his gloved right hand.

“What do you think about this?”

He wasn’t smiling-Tommy hardly ever smiled-but he was looking up at the wall with the expression of someone who might have made a real find. A large wall clock was hanging there, made of dark wood with Roman numerals behind the glass covering the clock face.

Henrik nodded. “Yes… could be worth something. Is it old?”

“I think so,” said Tommy, opening the glass door. “If we’re lucky, it’ll be an antique. German or French.”

“It’s not ticking.”

“Probably needs winding up.” He closed the door and shouted, “Freddy!”

After a few seconds the younger brother came clomping into the kitchen.

“What?”

“Give me a hand with this,” said Tommy.

Freddy had the longest arms of the three of them. He unhooked the clock and lifted it down. Then Henrik helped to carry it.

“Come on, let’s get it outside,” said Tommy.

The van was parked close to the house, in the shadows at the back.

It had kalmar pipes & welding on the sides. Tommy had bought plastic letters and stuck them on himself. There was no such welding company in Kalmar, but driving around in a company van at night looked less suspicious than some anonymous old delivery van.

“They’re opening a police station in Marnäs next week,” said Henrik as they were lifting the clock out through the veranda window.

There was almost no wind tonight, but the air was fresh and cold.

“How do you know?” said Tommy.

“It was in the paper this morning.”

He heard Freddy’s hoarse laugh in the darkness.

“Oh, well, that’s it then,” said Tommy. “You might as well ring them and rat the two of us out, then you might get a reduced sentence.”

He dropped his lower lip, showing his teeth; that was his way of smiling.

Henrik smiled back in the darkness. There were thousands of summer cottages for the police to keep an eye on all over the island, besides which they usually worked only during the day.

They placed the clock in the back of the van, alongside the collapsible exercise bike, two large vases made of polished limestone, a video player, a small outboard motor, a computer and printer, and a television with stereo speakers that were already in there.

“Shall we call it a night?” said Tommy when he had closed the back door of the van.

“Yes… I don’t think there’s anything else.”

Henrik went back to the house briefly anyway, to close the window. He picked up a couple of small pieces of shale from the ground and pushed them into the gaps in the wooden frame to hold the window in place.

“Come on,” shouted Tommy behind him.

The brothers thought it was a waste of time, closing the place up after a break-in. But Henrik knew it could be months before anyone came to the cottage, and with the window open the rain and snow would destroy the décor.

Tommy started the engine as Henrik climbed into the passenger seat. Then he lifted off a section of the door panel and reached inside. Wrapped in small pieces of paper towels was ice-crystal meth.

“Want another?” said Tommy.

“No. I’ve had enough.”

The brothers had brought the ice with them from the Continent, both to sell and for personal use. The crystals were like a kick up the backside, but if Henrik took more than one hit per night, he started quivering like a flagpole, and found it difficult to think logically. The thoughts thudded around in his head, and he couldn’t get to sleep.

He wasn’t a junkie, after all-but nor was he boring. One hit was fine.

Tommy and Freddy didn’t seem to have the same problem, or else they were planning to stay awake all night when they got back to Kalmar. They stuffed the crystals in their mouths, paper and all, and washed the whole lot down with water from a plastic bottle on the back seat. Then Tommy put his foot down. He swung the van around the house and out onto the empty village road.

Henrik looked at his watch-it was almost twelve-thirty.

“Okay, let’s go to the boathouse,” he said.

Up by the main highway Tommy stopped obediently at the stop sign, despite the fact that the road was completely clear, then turned south.

“Turn off here,” said Henrik after ten minutes, when the sign for Enslunda appeared.

There were no other cars or people around. The gravel track ended at the boathouses, and Tommy backed the van up as close as possible.

It was as dark as a cave down here by the sea, but up in the north the lighthouse at Eel Point was flashing.

Henrik opened the van door and heard the rushing of the waves. The sound drifted in from the coal-black sea. It made him think of his grandfather. He had actually died here, six years ago. Algot had been eighty-five years old and suffering from heart disease, but he had still crawled out of bed and taken a cab out here one windy winter’s day. The driver had dropped him off on the road, and soon after that he must have had a major heart attack. But Algot had managed to

get to his boathouse, and he had been found dead just by the door.

“I’ve got an idea,” said Tommy as they were unloading the stolen goods by the beam of the flashlights. “A suggestion. Listen up and tell me what you think.”

“What?”

Tommy didn’t reply. He just reached into the van and pulled something out. It looked like a large black woolen cap.

“We found this in Copenhagen,” he said.

Then he held the black fabric up to the flashlight, and Henrik could see that it wasn’t a cap. It was the kind of hood robbers wear, a balaclava, with holes for the eyes and the mouth.

“My suggestion is that we put these on next time,” said Tommy, “and move on from the summer cottages.”

“Move on? Move on to what?”

“Houses that aren’t empty.”

There was silence for a few moments in the shadows by the shore.

“Sure,” said Freddy.

Henrik looked at the hood without saying anything. He was thinking.

“I know… the risks increase,” said Tommy. “But so do the gains. We’ll never find cash or jewelry in the summer cottages… only in houses where people live all year round.” He dropped the hood back in the van and went on: “Of course we need to check with Aleister that everything’s okay. And we need to choose safe houses that are a bit out of the way, with no alarms.”

“And no dogs,” said Freddy.

“Correct. No bloody dogs either. And nobody will recognize us with the hoods on,” said Tommy, looking at Henrik. “So what do you think, then?”

“I don’t know.”

It wasn’t really about the money-Henrik had a good

trade these days-it was mostly the excitement he was after. It chased away the tedium of everyday life.

“Freddy and I will go solo, then,” said Tommy. “It’ll bring in more money, so that’s no problem.”

Henrik shook his head quickly. There might not be many more outings with Tommy and Freddy, but he wanted to decide for himself when to stop.

He thought about the ship in the bottle, smashed to pieces on the floor earlier that evening, and said, “I’m in… if we take it easy. And nobody gets hurt.”

“Who would we hurt?” said Tommy.

“The house owners.”

“They’ll be asleep, for fuck’s sake… and if anybody wakes up we’ll just speak English. Then they’ll think we’re foreigners.”

Henrik nodded, not completely convinced. He pulled the tarpaulin over the stolen items and fastened the padlock on the boathouse door.

They jumped into the van and set off south across the island, back toward Borgholm.

After twenty minutes they were in town, where rows of streetlamps drove away the October darkness. But the sidewalks were just as empty as the country roads. Tommy slowed down and pulled in by the apartment block where Henrik lived.

“Good,” he said. “In a week, then? Tuesday night next week?”

“Sure… but I’ll probably go out there before then.”

“You like living out here in the middle of nowhere?”

Henrik nodded.

“Okay,” said Tommy, “but don’t start trying to do any deals of your own with the stuff. We’ll find a buyer in Kalmar.”

“Fine,” said Henrik, closing the door of the van.

He walked toward the dark doorway and looked at his

watch. Half past one. It was pretty early despite everything, and he would be able to sleep in his lonely bed for five hours before the alarm woke him for his ordinary job.

He thought about all the houses on the island where people lay sleeping. Settled.

He’d get out if anything happened. If anyone woke up when they broke in, he’d just get out of there. The brothers and their fucking spirit in the glass could fend for themselves.